Untold Stories

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In those days, I don't suppose there was all that much to do in Sardinia, visiting the hospital quite a high point. Nowadays they probably go water-skiing". Jody Abrahams, Loukmaan Adams, Mandisa Bardill, Junaid Booysen, Salie Daniels, and Alistair Izobell (1999) The mill gone, my grandparents bought a hardware shop in West Vale outside Halifax but that too went bankrupt, through sheer kind-heartedness my mother said, and letting too much stuff out on credit. There is a picture of the shop in the sheaf of crumpled photographs and newspaper clippings that passes for our family album, the shop assistants lined up on the steps flanked by those Karnak columns of linoleum that enfiladed every hardware store down to my own childhood, and peeping through the door my mother’s blurred ten-year-old face. I do ask, though, about his other revelation, ‘the similar do’ he had told Mr Parr that Mam had had just before they were married. Was that to do with the suicide, I ask, as it must have been around the same time? Not really, says Dad. He thinks it was more to do with their wedding.

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett | Baillie Gifford Prize

Jury, Louise. "Historic night for Alan Bennett as his new play dominates the Olivier awards", The Independent, 21 February 2005 I tell him that I don’t think so and that what Mr Parr was after, presumably, was whether there had been anything similar in the family before. I start the car. Bennett is also known for a wide variety of audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. Funny, thoughtful, and fascinating, this wonderful series of essays and stories read by the author offers an extraordinary journey into an exceptional career. For those who want to hear Alan Bennett narrate more of his memoirs, Alan Bennett: Diaries is also available from BBC Audio. Beyond the Fringe (with Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore). London: Souvenir Press, 1962, and New York: Random House, 1963

I mean don’t get me wrong, it was still a decent enough read, it’s just a bit of a trek and it will take a ton of commitment. That’s particularly true when you get to the diaries, because even though they do tie in with major events and take you behind the scenes on some of his creative projects, you’re still just sitting there reading diary entries. It’s not quite as dull as reading a collection of letters, but it’s not far off either. At the National Theatre in late 2009 Nicholas Hytner directed Bennett's play The Habit of Art, about the relationship between the poet W. H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten. [13] Untold Stories takes its title from the autobiographical sketch that opens the book. Alan Bennett was the physically late-developing child of a family in the Armley district of Leeds, a northern English industrial city. His father was a butcher who owned two suits, both of which smelled of raw meat. His mother was the supporting pillar of the household, but was also prone to bouts of depression. As a child, Alan Bennett seemed to dream less than most. Perhaps he is still less than able to admit the breadth of his flights of fancy. “With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life you do and is sometimes easier to access.” This sounds remarkably like e e cummings, a character that would not usually be linked with someone as apparently domesticated as Alan Bennett. Mr Parr doesn’t think it’s relevant either, but standing on his doorstep as we drive away he may well be thinking that this is an odd family that censors its own history and it’s that that’s relevant.

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We had left Mam at a hospital that morning looking, even after weeks of illness, not much different from her usual self: weeping and distraught, it's true, but still plump and pretty, clutching her everlasting handbag and still somehow managing to face the world. As I followed my father down the ward I wondered why we were bothering: there was no such person here. Find sources: "Alan Bennett"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( November 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) It’s Mary, love. I’m off now. They’ve just rung me a taxi.’ She turned to me: ‘Could you just go and see if it’s come.’ At the end [John Gielgud] was given a round of applause by cast and crew, which I felt had not much to do with the quality of the speech so much as his having stayed alive long enough to deliver it". Gani, Aisha (31 October 2015). "Alan Bennett: Tories govern with 'totalitarian attitude' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 May 2018.Bennett, Alan (2014). "Fair Play". London Review of Books. 36 (12): 29–30 . Retrieved 13 June 2014. Bennett’s phenomenally successful play The History Boys (2004), about a group of boys from a northern grammar school attempting the Oxford entrance exam during the 1980s, combines criticism of revisionist historians and neo-Gradgrindian educational practices with the statement of a fundamental – if unfashionable – belief in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Here, as in Forty Years On, 35 years earlier, school can be read as a metaphor for nation: differences between the cultural references in the two plays chart further shifts in British cultural and social life. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, then after a period of National Service, became a lecturer for a short time at Oxford University. He co-wrote and starred in Beyond the Fringe (1963), a satirical review, along with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. Later the show travelled to the West End and to New York. After this, he started writing for the stage and, later, for television. To date he has been actor, director and broadcaster, and written for stage, television, radio and film. His work focuses on the everyday and the mundane; on people with typically British characteristics and obsessions. The suicide, though, he cannot be persuaded to discuss. Having let on to the fact, he still seems to want to keep it hidden and will not be questioned about it, sensing perhaps that my interest in it is as drama and only one stage up from gossip. As a child I was clever and knew it and when I showed off, as I often did, Dad would not trouble to hide his distaste. I detect a whiff of that still; he is probably wishing he’d kept his mouth shut and never mentioned the tragedy at all.

The Guardian Chronicles of a death foretold | Biography books | The Guardian

Bennett adapted his 1991 play The Madness of George III for the cinema. Entitled The Madness of King George (1994), the film received four Academy Award nominations: for Bennett's writing and the performances of Nigel Hawthorne and Helen Mirren. It won the award for best art direction.In July 2018, Allelujah!, a comic drama by Bennett about a National Health Service hospital threatened with closure, opened at London's Bridge Theatre to critical acclaim. [17] Personal life [ edit ] The headstone, in Larch Wood (Railway Cutting) cemetery, of Alan Bennett's Uncle Clarence, subject of a 1985 radio monologue No,’ I say and without doubt or hesitation. After all, I’m the educated one of the family. If there had been ‘anything like this’ I should have known about it. But Bennett absolutely martyrs himself on the altar of his sexuality and sexual inadequacy. I would hope that I temper my more downbeat stories with rather more humour than Bennett shows here. I'm presently struggling through the diaries. With all the people that Bennett knew, you would have thought they would be full of amusing anecdotes but, really, if I have to read about ANOTHER visit to some flipping church and its marvellous burial crypt, I dare say I'll fling the darn book across the room! He also wears his learning like a trophy, taking pleasure in some little literary whimsy or simile that you need to be an Oxford don to comprehend. Now I know how my sister used to feel when I used "big words" that, to me, with my grammar school education, were commonplace but to her were just "showing off"! The Broadway Advocacy Coalition / David Byrne's American Utopia / Freestyle Love Supreme / Graciela Daniele (2021)

Alan Bennett Untold Stories: Part 1: Stories by Alan Bennett Alan Bennett Untold Stories: Part 1: Stories by Alan Bennett

And in the kissing and the naming my parents were revealed stripped of all defence. Though they were the tenderest and most self-sufficient couple, I had never seen my father do anything so intimate as to kiss my mother’s hand and seldom since childhood heard them call each other by name. ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’ was what my brother and I called them and what they called each other, their proper names kept for best. Or worst.

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Bennett was portrayed by Harry Enfield as Stalin, in an episode of "Talking Heads of State", in BBC Two's 2014 satirical Harry and Paul's Story of the Twos. [36] Alan Bennett: timeline of the writer's life". The Daily Telegraph. 3 November 2015. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022.